The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Daily Dispatch

Say It Ain't So, Rodney!

In January I wrote about Rodney, a junior in one of my English classes in the 1980, who walked into my class one day wearing an "Ozzy for President!" T-shirt. "Ozzy for President!" he proclaimed proudly as he bounced past my desk. Rodney was a nice kid, though not the brightest I had, and something of a head banger wannabe. In the post, I imagined I asked him, "If Ozzy Osbourne was really running for president, if there was really a chance he'd be leading the United States of America, would you vote for him?" And I imagined Rodney replying, "Well, no, probably not . . . But wouldn't it be cool if Ozzy was president?"

I went on to postulate that Rodney was like a lot of Trump supporters, that they loved thinking about Trump as president, but when they were confronted by the possibility of him actually sitting in the Oval Office, they'd realize what a ridiculous idea it was. And I wrote that somewhere down the line, maybe not in the early primaries but later on, "Trump's support will start to crumble, and once that starts, there will be no stopping his downward slide."

I began the last paragraph of that post by writing, "But what do I know? I could be completely wrong." It's looking more and more like I was wrong, completely wrong, ridiculously wrong. Unless some of the recent anti-Trump advertising takes hold or people wake up from their reality show revery on their own, Trump will steamroll his way to the Republican nomination. I haven't completely lost faith, but I'm beginning to think Rodney, now in his late 40s, is one of those guys at a Black Sabbath concert Trump rally taking the pledge.